The NBA legend and pop-culture critic says of Arie Luyendyk Jr.'s uneidted, split-screen Bachelor breakup with Becca K.: "This may not be sexual harassment, but it definitely appears to be emotional harassment encouraged by the producers. Go means, Go! Worse was Chris Harrison’s campaign of damage control as the host tried to justify the show’s bad behavior. He didn’t seem to understand that what they did crossed a line that shredded the fantasy we were all willing to agree to — against our rational thinking — that the show’s ultimate goal was to give love a chance. But those scenes, and Chris Harrison’s unbridled glee in declaring this was 'reality television history,' revealed a malevolence and disregard that shocked and embarrassed us. Instead of being on a romantic journey together, we had tossed one of our own into the gladiatorial arena to be devoured for our amusement. But we were not amused."

Harrison was 30 when The Bachelor premiered in 2002. He was about the same age as The Bachelors. But at age 46, Harrison has been struggling to keep up with his "host-as-pal" persona. He seems more concerned with The Bachelor franchise, and not The Bachelor himself -- or as Willa Paskin put in her review of Monday's finale, Harrison is "an emotional succubus posing as an empath.” Indeed, as Kathryn VanArendonk notes, Harrison is "a man whose onscreen personality has long since been scooped out and replaced with corporate-speak and a burning desire for better ratings and social-media engagement. He is a human-shaped instantiation of network notes." She adds that Harrison's approach to The Bachelor is stuck in 2002, and needs a shakeup. "His tone, his demeanor, and his transparent pleasure at hyping a calamitous breakup have become the embodied tone of The Bachelor," she says. "Outside, it’s all solicitous worry for the people involved. Inside, it’s a complete contempt for the softies who think maybe you shouldn’t, say, cast racist suitors for the first black Bachelorette. If Harrison is a puppet, what I’m arguing is that the strings are now way too visible."

ABC reality chief Robert Mills explains the decision to show the finale breakup in real time using a split screen: "Once we saw the footage it was a two-second thing," he says. "Instant. We really needed everyone to see this and have kind of the same reaction we were having. It's like the old saying, there's three sides to every story, yours, mine and the truth. And no one's lying. And that's sort of the case here, where the more of that that we can capture, so everyone can actually see it, and not say, 'Well, I said this,' 'No, actually I said this.' Last night, there was no doubt as to what went down there, between Arie and Becca. You now know everything, whether you agree with it, or disagree with it. You see it all, and you're able to make your decision on how you feel about it." On the accusations that Arie was forced to break up on camera, Mills says "of course he could have done it off camera if he wanted to," adding: "You can't force somebody into doing something."

Last night's finale "made for insanely great and awful television," says Willa Paskin. "The whole episode was beyond canny," she adds. "The decision to use unedited footage would have made this a buzzy episode in and of itself, but it was a choice that fit the material: Only at full length do we get to see the accruing aggression of Arie’s attentiveness, the way his hanging around becomes so unappealingly claustrophobic. It also made the most out of the material, stretching what might have been a five-minute sequence to 20 minutes, while milking Becca’s relative restraint for all it was worth, getting to be unquestionably 'real' and lighting up social media with an 'innovation' in a long-running franchise."

Some viewers and Bachelor alums were outraged by the brutal footage shown on Monday night's season finale. But when you really think about it, says Samantha Allen, "none of this matters...The Bachelor is an abyss of meaning, vacant but transfixing. I don’t doubt that Becca K.’s heartbreak is genuine. But she is just one more spurned contestant who, in all likelihood, will go on to become the Bachelorette, collect a five-to-six figure check, and start a failed relationship of her very own. The cycle will continue, nothing will change, and I will still watch." Allen adds: The Bachelor has always been an exercise in forcing human beings to conform to rigid and arbitrary rules for finding romance, and yet we still act scandalized every time one of these relationships fails spectacularly. It is simultaneously thrilling and depressing to watch contestants get right to the brink of realizing that the system they inhabit is broken, like witnessing Westworld robots edge dangerously closer to self-awareness."

Ross Jirgl, a Stanford football coach specializing in sports performance, explained that he had to crash The Bachelor after hearing from a mutual friend that his ex-girlfriend of seven years was a competitor. So he tracked down contact information for the producers. “It's kind of crazy to say, but I think it was going to take something big like this for me to actually be over her," Jirgl, who hasn't seen last week's episode, told The Athletic. "The way I look at it is, I flew to Peru during the busiest week of the year to go on a TV show, risking my reputation on national TV to get her back. When she said no, I could completely see it in her eyes." Jirgl said he's now totally over Becca. ALSO: What about Ross Jirgl as the next Bachelor?

"Although, as Becca points out, this entire mission could be seen as Notebook-style romantic, it actually feels decidedly unsafe," Ariana Romero says of Monday night's twist. "It’s obvious from her reaction to Ross standing in her doorway — staring at him in shock and then the camera — no one asked her if this invasion of privacy was okay. That means her location was shared against her will with someone she purposefully removed from her life. Although Ross repeatedly claims he’s thought about her nonstop since their breakup, Becca doesn’t share the same sentiments despite their seven-year dating history."

An excerpt from Los Angeles Times writer Amy Kaufman's new book, Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure, delves into the search and screening for potential contestants. Potential contestants who become finalists for a spot on the show have to undergo a medical examination to test for drugs and sexually transmitted diseases. If they have an STD, they are immediately eliminated. "As soon as the medical tests came back, you’d see that herpes was the biggest thing,” said Ben Hatta, former personal assistant to Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss “And sometimes you’d be the first person to tell a contestant that they had herpes. You’d be like, ‘Uh, you should call your doctor.’ Why? ‘We’re not going to be able to have you on our show, but you should call your doctor.’"